T S M J C F T F W G The Symbol without Meaning from THE FLIGHT OF THE WILD GANDER Digital Edition Text copyright © 1951, 1969 by Joseph Campbell. Copyright © 1957, 1960 by Rhein-Verlag, AG Zurich. Copyright © 1990, 2002 by Joseph Campbell Foundation. Digital edition copyright ©2018 by Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF.org) All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Contact JCF to inquire about permission at the address [email protected] For information about this edition, see the Editor's Note. For sources used, see the chapter notes. Ebook by tillpoint Digital Press version 1.1.0 JCF Thank you for maintaining this ebook for your personal use. If you have received this book gratis, please join JCF's associates in supporting our on-going efforts to bring out new, inspiring editions such as this by making a donation at JCF.org. The Joseph Campbell Foundation is a registered 501(c) 3 United States not-for-profit corporation. For further information, visit our website (www.jcf.org) Ebook ISBN 978-1-61178-010-9 T C W J C t his death in 1987, Joseph Campbell left a significant body of published work that explored his lifelong passion, the complex of universal myths A and symbols that he called “Mankind’s one great story.” He also left, however, a large volume of unreleased work: uncollected articles, notes, letters, and diaries, as well as audio- and videotape-recorded lectures. Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF) — founded in 1990 to preserve, protect, and perpetuate Campbell’s work — has undertaken to create a digital archive of his papers and recordings and to publish The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell. Robert Walter, Executive Editor David Kudler, Managing Editor THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL Print: Ebooks: Video: Audio: T S M Figure 1 - Buddha with Swastika (bronze, China, twentieth century A.D.) P I T I M S T WAS BERTRAND RUSSELL, AS I RECALL, who once told a New York audience that all Americans believe the world was created in 1492 and redeemed in 1776. The cultural conditioning of an American, then, may account for the Ihistory and theory of mythological symbols that I am about to offer in this chapter. However, since one of the main themes of my subject is to be that of the provincial character of all that we are prone to regard as universal, we may let the presentation itself stand as an illustration of its own thesis. I cannot forget that for many centuries the vast majority of the great as well as minor thinkers of Europe believed that the world was created about 4004 B.C. and redeemed in the first century A.D.; that Cain, the eldest son of the first human couple, was the first agriculturalist, the first murderer, and the first builder of cities; that the Creator of the Universe once held in particular regard a certain tribe of Near Eastern nomads, for whom he parted the waters of the Red Sea and to whom he communicated, in person, his program for the human race; and that, because of the failure of this people to recognize himself when he then became incarnate among them as the son of one of their daughters, the Creator of the Universe transferred his attention to the northern shores of the Mediterranean: to Italy, Spain, and France, to Switzerland, Germany, and England, to Holland and Scandinavia, and for a while, also, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I am quite ready to admit, therefore, that it does seem to me that when the prows of Columbus’s three brave little ships (the Santa Maria was a vessel of only one hundred tons, the Pinta a caravel of fifty, and the Niña a mere forty tons)—when the prows of these three nutshells cut through the world- encircling Uroboros, Ocean, the mythological age of European thought was dealt a lethal blow and the modern age of global thinking, adventurous experiment, and empirical demonstration inaugurated. Hardly two centuries earlier, Saint Thomas Aquinas had sought to show, by reasonable argument, that the garden of paradise from which Adam and Eve had been expelled was an actual region of this physical earth, still somewhere to be found. “The situation of paradise,” he had written, “is shut off from the habitable world by mountains, or seas, or some torrid region, which cannot be crossed; and so people who have written about topography make no mention of it.”[Note 1] The Venerable Bede, five and a half centuries before, had sensibly suggested that paradise could not be a corporeal place but must be entirely spiritual; [Note 2] Augustine, however, had already rejected such a notion, maintaining that paradise was, and is, both spiritual and corporeal; [Note 3] and it was to Augustine’s view that Aquinas brought support. “For whatever Scripture tells us about paradise,” he wrote, “is set down as a matter of history; and wherever Scripture makes use of this method, we must hold to the historical truth of the narrative as a foundation of whatever spiritual explanation we may offer.” [Note 4] Dante, it will be recalled, placed paradise on the summit of the mountain of purgatory, which his century situated in the middle of an imagined ocean covering the whole of the southern hemisphere; and Columbus shared this mythological image. The earth, wrote Columbus, is shaped “like a pear, of which one part is round, but the other, where the stalk comes, elongated;” or “like a very round ball, on one part of which Figure 2 - Dante before Mt. Purgatory there is a protuberance, like a woman’s nipple.” [Note 5] The protuberance was to be found, Columbus believed, in the south; and on his third voyage, when his vessels sailed more rapidly northward than southward, he believed this showed that they had begun to go downhill. And he was the more convinced of his error, since, some weeks earlier, at the southern reach of his voyage, when he had sailed between the island of Trinidad and the mainland of South America, the volume of fresh water pouring into the ocean from the mighty Orinoco, “the roar, as of thunder” that occurred where the river met the sea, and the height of the waves, which nearly wrecked his ships, had assured him that so great a volume of fresh water could have had its origin only in one of the four rivers of paradise, and that he had at last, therefore, attained to the stalk end of the pear. [Note 6] Sailing north, he was leaving paradise behind. Columbus died without knowing that he had actually delivered the first of a series of blows that were presently to annihilate every image, not only of an earthly, but even of a celestial paradise. In 1497, Vasco da Gama rounded South Africa, and in 1520, Magellan, South America: the torrid region and the seas were crossed, and no paradise found. In 1543, Copernicus published his exposition of the heliocentric universe, and some sixty years later, Galileo commenced his celestial researches with a telescope. And, as we know, these researches led immediately to the condemnation of the new cosmology by the Holy Inquisition. Whereas you, Galileo, [wrote the holy fathers] son of the late Vincenzio Galilei, of Florence, aged seventy years, were denounced in 1615, to this Holy Office, for holding as true a false doctrine taught by many, namely, that the sun is immovable in the center of the world, and that the earth moves, and also with a diurnal motion; also, for having pupils whom you instructed in the same opinions; also for maintaining a correspondence on the same with some German mathematicians; also, for publishing certain letters on the sun-spots, in which you developed the same doctrine as true; also, for answering the objections which were continually produced from the Holy Scriptures, by glozing the said Scriptures according to your own meaning; and whereas thereupon was produced the copy of a writing, in form of a letter professedly written by you to a person formerly your pupil, in which, following the hypothesis of Copernicus, you include several propositions contrary to the true sense and authority of the Holy Scriptures; therefore (this Holy Tribunal being desirous of providing against the disorder and mischief which were thence proceeding and increasing to the detriment of the Holy Faith) by the desire of his Holiness and of the Most Eminent Lords, Cardinals of this supreme and universal Inquisition, the two propositions of the stability of the sun, and the motion of the earth, were qualified by the Theological Qualifiers as follows: 1. The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures. 2. The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith. Therefore…invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of His Most Glorious Virgin Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence…: We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo… have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture, and, consequently, that you have incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated in the sacred canons and other general and particular constituents against delinquents of this description.